Another Government Wolf Bites
Dust In Reintroduction Scheme

PHOENIX — Scratch one more wolf.

Less than a year after 11 Mexican wolves were released in a highly touted reintroduction effort, at least five are known dead, another is assumed dead, and the remainder have been recaptured to save them from the rigors of the wild.

Investigators found an 18 month-old male wolf dead last week after radio collar signals indicated he had stopped moving for several hours, said Tom Bauer, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It appears to have been shot, he said.

Of the other wolves released earlier this year, four were shot, five were recaptured and one is missing and presumed dead. Federal officials have offered a reward for information in three of the shootings; the fourth wolf was shot by a camper, who was not prosecuted.

A week earlier, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and environmental activists gathered for a photo-op designed to rekindle support for the crumbling reintroduction scheme by playing up the release of two new female wolves into acclimation pens in the Apache National Forest.

Two of the recaptured animals, both males, were returned from the wild to be paired with the new arrivals. They will spend several weeks in the pens before they're set free, Bauer said last week. The other three were recaptured because the deaths of their mates or fellow pack members had left them alone.

"There are no wolves free in the wild in Arizona today," he said. Despite its dismal record so far, federal officials insist they expected some deaths and contend the program isn't failing.

The scheme has been heavily opposed by ranchers and some rural residents, who are now being accused by wolf promoters of some sort of orchestrated conspiracy to thwart the program, even though no evidence regarding the shootings has apparently surfaced.

"All the problems that have come up so far are human caused," said Craig Miller, Southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. "Wolves are very adaptable. All that needs to happen is people not shoot them."

One wolf promoter has even gone so far as to accuse a New Mexico rancher of soliciting "hit men" to kill the government wolves; she claimed to have received her information from a convict.

More skeptical observers question how any effort by opponents to shoot the elusive wolves could have been so successful, given the vast terrain over which they range and their unpredictable movements. To pull off that many successful shootings, they point out, would appear to require inside knowledge of the wolves' whereabouts at any given time — the sort of information provided by their radio telemetry collars.

That sort of information is not available to the scheme's opponents, but it is available to supporters. Given the brand of "scorched-earth" tactics increasingly embraced by "green" activists, some observers contend it wouldn't be at all out of character for the more radical among them to "sacrifice" a few individual wolves for the "greater good."

They might consider it a cheap price to pay if it could generate public sympathy for a program that is both legally and environmentally questionable — particularly if they could vilify their opponents in the process.